Politics. Sex. Science. Art. You know, the good stuff.

Stephanie Zvan is an analyst by trade, but she's paid not to talk about it. She is also the associate president of Minnesota Atheists and one of the hosts for their radio show and podcast, Atheists Talk. She speaks on science and skepticism in a number of venues, including science fiction and fantasy conventions.

Stephanie has been called a science blogger and a sex blogger, but if it means she has to choose just one thing to be or blog about, she's decided she's never going to grow up. In addition to science and sex and the science of sex, you'll find quite a bit of politics here, some economics, a regular short fiction feature, and the occasional bit of concentrated weird.

Oh, and arguments. She sometimes indulges in those as well. But I'm sure everything will be just fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

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EVENTS

I’m Gonna Tell on You

Yesterday morning, I received an interesting comment from a fellow named Sig on my second post examining the claim used by MRAs (as documented here, and seen in current usage to shut women up here) that prison rape means more men than women are raped in a year.

Stephanie as Im not allowed to comment here… Im going to be making multiple posts about the false assertions you have made relating to rape about myself and everyone else in the mens movement.

It starts with the fact that Sig’s idea of publicizing how evil I am is to put four posts up on Reddit. No, really. Then we have the fact that he put up one post to that effect and threefullposts trumpeting my results because they supposedly demonstrate gender parity in rape. (For the record, they don’t, and they only come as close as they do because I bent over backward to give the MRA hypothesis every reasonable chance by ignoring that women are raped at higher rates in incarceration.)

Then there’s the discussion on Reddit. The bits about the numbers are fun.

She claims that the rotating population inflates the numbers, but then later claims the rotating population hides the real rape rates for women.

She pointed out women are raped 2-3 times per capita than men, but ignored that men outnumber women ~20 to 1, and are 4-5 times more likely to be raped in the first 24 hours.

Well, no. That’s not what I said at all.

Her chart has almost 4 million women being raped every year. The National Crime Victimization Survey has less than 200,000 women being raped every year. She’s over-stating the number of rapes as surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics by 2000% percent. She claims that she’s getting this number from the NISVS, or the recent CDC report of sexual victimization. She doesn’t say whether she’s using the NISVS data for the most recent 12-month period or the lifetime data. Another glaring omission and error. My guess is she used whatever data showed the most female rapes.

Notice how she craftily switches her comparison data from the NCVS survey to the CDC’s NISVS report. It’s two different reports with two different methodologies. In her original article, she stated that the BJS’s NCVS was the proper data source to use to compare the BJS’s prison survey data. Now she wants to use the NISVS data. Why? Because the NISVS data shows more rapes than the NCVS data does. The NCVS is a more comprehensive survey compiled by the Department of Justice, just like prison inmate surveys. The NISVS is a CDC report.

That old article that doesn’t even mention NISVS? Or for that matter it fails to mention that even the NVAWS cited men being raped outside jails at one third the rate of women. I bet it used lifetime rates — those liars always do. So old at this I don’t even have to read the crap any more.

Also fun is that in Sig’s complaint post, he’s all upset that I suggested MRAs are “interested” in prison rape mostly as a way to tell feminists to shut up. So what happens on Reddit?

How do they live with themselves, no concience. They are like sociopaths who cannot feel emathy for anything with a penis.

This is why you can’t discuss politics with a feminist.

The insanity of feminists is apparent here.

[…]

I dub her “feminist traffic whore”.

Feminism is not a dogma that teaches critical thinking or actual statistical analysis. It isn’t even a science. If it were a science, we’d consider it part of the extremely soft sciences. All feminism teaches is how to portray any situation as men are to blame, men have it better, and women are victims.

So in this case she’s probably not actually trying to present bad data. She’s just doesn’t know any better.

The quotes are because you cannot be an atheist/skeptic and a feminist at the same time because feminism is a faith based ism and quasi-religion.

I think that using false assertions and claims relating to rape / abuse / violence is so ingrained in their culture that they just do it out of habit.

It’s a great example of female solipsism.

Did you seriously expect a feminist not to lie?

But don’t forget, it’s all about the victims, not about trying to say feminists are evil. Right?

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Comments

Oh, these MRA types are a bunch of mean spirited jerks who think they can be cute by trying to play wah wah victim. Look, MRA morons, we are not impressed.

I would say most people – whether they identify as feminist or not – abhor rape. It doesn’t matter what the sex or age of the victim is – sane people all know it is a horrible, violent crime. So MRAs if you reallly gave a shit, you would do something constructive to stop rape – bringing pressure to bear on the Catholic church that has been hiding pedophiles, fighting for prison reform, and fighting against rape culture.

The complaint that I put down in the original thread (I think) still stands. Even if assuming that male prison rape means that there are more male victims than female victims, it doesn’t change the reality that the overwhelming majority of rapists are men. (Actually it kinda reinforces it but whatever)

Progress on this issue is made when the current spotlight on the victim (that is, what could the victim have done to prevent it) is pulled back and put on the perpetrator. MRA groups do not like this, for whatever reason.

Because of this, the argument is wrong at every level. The stats they are trying to prove do not prove anything close to what they want to prove (exactly the opposite). It’s nothing more than trolling.

Even if assuming that male prison rape means that there are more male victims than female victims, it doesn’t change the reality that the overwhelming majority of rapists are men.

Was anyone claiming otherwise? I’m not sure how this is relevant.

I’d point that Just Detention International, a group that actually is doing something about prison rape, doesn’t overtly give priority to male victims or feature any MRA victim one-upsmanship on their website. They use appeals to basic human decency as their main tactic.

Unfortunately yes Ace, the common point behind all the theatrics is trying to remove the link between male society and rape. In what Stephanie quotes above, if he ended the “false statement” just saying “Most rape victims are women”, that would be one thing, but adding “most rapists are men” gives up the game.

And yeah. My experience is that attitude is unfortunately all too common.

For fuxake, regardless as to whether men or women “win” in the rape-victim statistics contest MRAs want to have here (and what the hell s the point of that, MRAs?), why don’t you put your efforts into doing something about that rather than attacking feminists constantly? Feminists certainly don’t spend there time belittling male victims of rape, and they aren’t doing anything to stop male-on male prison rape from being recognized. In fact, every feminist I’ve encountered would like to have any and all forms of rape and violation stopped. What is with you guys?

I’m not sold on the notion that MRAs give a rats ass about prison rape. It seems to me that they bring it up primarily to show teh wimminz how much tougher teh menz have it. And, of course, to demonstrate how pathetic they are.

[Aside]Whenever I write MRA, my fingers want to type MRSA. Is this some sort of Freudian thing?[/Aside]

I have never once come across a feminist who thought that prison rape (and its attendant usage in popular culture for humour) was anything other than a tragedy. Granted, some feminists (including me) think that the cultural trivialization of male-male prison rape is lamentable at least partly for the effect it has on our general perception of rape, which injures women far more than it does men in the non-incarcerated population.

(I’d also like to point out that female-female rape occurs in all-women prisons as well, but that fact goes largely ignored in popular culture, and so seems beyond MRAs’ notice.)

The converse is also true: our *general* trivialization of rape is what helps to lend cultural space to the trivialization of male-male prison rape. The best way to get people to take prison rape seriously is to get people to take *all rape* seriously, which by way of necessity includes the vast majority of male-perpetrated, female-victimed cases. Yes, it’s possible for a woman to rape another woman, and more rarely for a woman to rape a man. But the reason those cases aren’t taken seriously by most people is because male-female rape isn’t taken seriously by most people.

We do have a serious problem of infantilizing men in our culture–the saying “boys will be boys” only gets more insulting the more one thinks about it–but feminists didn’t start that process, and we don’t perpetuate it. And if we men want to band together to improve our lives, the most effective way to do that is by cooperating rather than competing with women. Because men treating women as possessions is one of the main contributing factors that has turned men into the butt of prison-rape jokes in the first place.

So “man up,” and show that you care about other human beings…and that you consider women part of humanity. It’s honestly not that hard.

Those Men’s Rights Assholes (I’m talking about the specific assholes quoted, not all Men’s Rights supporters, though I’m actually yet to meet one that wasn’t primarily interested in reinforcing male privilege and therefore an asshole; I will grant that the existence of such a person is entirely possible) don’t realize that there are male feminists, do they? Or the overwhelming majority of (female, male, transgender, and intersexed) feminists who like men that are not misogynists (and even sometimes men who are)?

I’m guessing it’s an issue of universalizing personal experience: because feminists don’t tend to like misogynists like the commenters, and they’re assuming their experiences to be universally representative of men, the conclusion that feminists don’t like men follows. Of course, they’re engaging in bad thinking, because the premise that their personal experiences are representative of the experiences of all men is absolutely false; so much for the claim to rational skepticism.

@9: But why are we wasting time talking about things that affect women when there are things that affect MEN about which to worry? Male-male prison rape is a much bigger problem, especially for ME, so everyone should care about it more than the trivial problems impacting them! Won’t someone think of teh menz??!!11!1

He used to post comments on my blog as Eoghan. Literally hundreds if not thousands. (Ultimately I banned him, and he tried to return several times under new identities and from new IPs, but he always gave himself away.)

Whenever he disagrees with something a feminist says about rape, he accuses them of “making false allegations about rape.” (Or something similar.)